Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless LAN (local area network) setup, particularly to a wireless photographic device and a voice setup method therefor.
Description of the Related Art
Wireless LAN has become a feature of the twenty-first century. If optical fiber completes the last mile of Internet access, then the last ten yards of that mile, for many households, cafés, libraries, and even transport stations, is wireless LAN. Because several wireless LANs may exist in one space, configuring a device to connect to one of the many existing access points typically requires knowledge of the name (service set identifier) and the security key (e.g. a pre-shared key) of that particular access point: a seemingly simple setting, yet rather inconvenient in practice. Consider an IP (Internet Protocol) camera having a wireless interface for example. The biggest difference between the IP camera and a webcam is that the IP camera can operate independently and obtain network access without having to be connected through, say, USB with a computer first. In general, the IP camera may also have a wired interface such as Ethernet, so that a user can connect the camera to a wired network, discover it on that network from other networking equipment (e.g. a laptop or a tablet), and perform wireless LAN setup over the wired network through a webpage interface provided by the camera. The procedure is more complicated if the IP camera has only the wireless interface: The user needs to turn the camera into an access point, and then connect to and configure it using other wireless equipment. The user may otherwise employ extra equipment to generate a two-dimensional barcode (e.g. QR code). The camera scans the barcode held at short distance to be informed of which wireless LAN to connect to and what security key to use.
The disadvantage of the methods described above is that the lack of a man-machine interface necessitates auxiliary equipment, creates additional cost, and exposes more operation complexity and even hazard to the configuring user.